Many archives don’t have the resources to install software or subscribe to a service such as Archivematica, but still have a mandate to collect and preserve born-digital records. Below is a digital-preservation workflow created by Tyler McNally at the University of Manitoba. If you have a similar workflow at your institution, include it in the comments.

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Recently I completed an internship at the University of Manitoba’s College of Medicine Archives, working with Medical Archivist Jordan Bass. A large part of my work during this internship dealt with building digital infrastructure for the archive to utilize in working on digital preservation. As a small operation, the archive does not have the resources to really pursue any kind of paid or difficult to use system.

Originally, our plan was to use the open-source, self-install version of Archivematica, but certain issues that cropped up made this impossible, considering the resources we had at hand. We decided that we would simply make our own digital-preservation workflow, using open-source and free software to convert our files for preservation and access, check for viruses, and create checksums—not every service that Archivematica offers, but enough to get our files stored safely. I thought other institutions of similar size and means might find the process I developed useful in thinking about their own needs and capabilities.

My first chance to process an email collection came when a small nonprofit organization[1] in the mid-Atlantic selected my institution as the home for its records. The organization was closing its doors after several decades of advocacy around government transparency. My contact, Fergus[2], made clear from the beginning that he wanted us to preserve the organization’s email as part of the project. I explained the features of ePADD, emphasizing the filtering mechanisms and the ability to isolate items that contained sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Based on Fergus’s enthusiasm, I naively assumed that the employees’ commitment to transparency extended to their own inboxes.

When Fergus announced our intentions to current and former employees, the protests began pouring in. There were several reasons for concern: many employees used their work email addresses for personal correspondence, the accounts contained information from a number of confidential mailing lists, and there were conversations with politically-active people who had expectations of confidentiality. At this point, I also learned that most employees of the organization no longer had access to their accounts and were unable to clean up sensitive information.

I knew ePADD could make short work of the sensitive PII and mailing lists. However, the private conversations were a big part of the appeal—I couldn’t promise to filter those, but I did offer to restrict the accounts for a period of time and emphasized that access would be onsite only. Later I suggested that transfers could be opt-in, but the damage had already been done. The last straw came when federal government staff got wind of the plan and began voicing their concerns. We had to cancel the project in the face of overwhelming opposition and continued on with the rest of the collection.

There are a number of lessons to take away from this email debacle: do not assume that the organization’s representative is aware of the potential problems with email; make sure that all affected employees have the opportunity to pull out anything personal; and speak face-to-face with members of the organization whenever possible, preferably with a demonstration of ePADD. As a result of our experience, I’m developing a set of questions to guide initial conversations about email:

Does your organizations have any official policies related to use of its email accounts? Is email expected to be part of the public record? How are employees notified of this policy and when?

What is the email culture at your organization? Do employees routinely use work email for personal reasons?

What kind of work-related email exchanges take place on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? Are any of these of a sensitive political nature? Will any of the work-related content need to be restricted? For how long?

Are the accounts of former employees retained? For how long? How long do they retain access to the account after leaving the organization?

Taking email records from individuals who continue to work in the field requires a sensitive touch. I’ll be better prepared next time to deal with the very real difficulties of convincing people to pry open their inboxes. Despite the technical challenges of digital preservation, I’ve discovered that acquisition is sometimes the hardest part of the process.

[1] The organization has been anonymized to prevent further consternation for former employees.

Angela White is the Philanthropic Studies Archivist at IUPUI in Indianapolis. She collects the records of nonprofit organizations and fundraisers to support the work of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. She is currently in conversations with a number of individuals about accessioning their email records.

Many of us working with archival materials are looking for tools and methods to support arrangement, description, and discovery of electronic records and born digital collections, as well as large bodies of digitized text. Natural Language Processing (NLP), which uses algorithms and mathematical models to process natural language, offers a variety of potential solutions to support this work. Several efforts have investigated using NLP solutions for analyzing archival materials, including TOME (Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization), Ed Summers’ Fondz, and Thomas Padilla’s Woese Collection work, among others, though none have resulted in a major tool for broader use.

One of these projects, ArchExtract, was carried out at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in 2014-2015. ArchExtract sought to apply several NLP tools and methods to large digital text collections and build a web application that would package these largely command-line NLP tools into an interface that would make it easy for archivists and researchers to use.

The ArchExtract project focused on facilitating analysis of the content and, via that analysis, discovery by researchers. The development work was done by an intern from the UC Berkeley School of Information, Janine Heiser, who built a web application that implements several NLP tools, including Topic Modelling, Named Entity Recognition, and Keyword Extraction to explore and present large, text-based digital collections.

The ArchExtract application extracts topics, named entities (people, places, subjects, dates, etc.), and keywords from a given collection. The application automates, implements, and extends various natural language processing software tools, such as MALLET and the Stanford Core NLP toolkit, and provides a graphical user interface designed for non-technical users.

In testing the application, we found the automated text analysis tools in ArchExtract were successful in identifying major topics, as well as names, dates, and places found in the text, and their frequency, thereby giving archivists an understanding of the scope and content of a collection as part of the arrangement and description process. We called this process “dynamic arrangement and description,” as materials can be re-arranged using different text processing settings so that archivists can look critically at the collection without changing the physical or virtual arrangement.

The topic models, in particular, surfaced documents that may have been related to a topic but did not contain a specific keyword or entity. The process was akin to the sort of serendipity a researcher might achieve when shelf reading in the analog world, wherein you might find what you seek without knowing it was there. And while topic modelling has been criticized for being inexact, it can be “immensely powerful for browsing and isolating results in thousands or millions of uncatalogued texts” (Schmidt, 2012). This, combined with the named entity and keyword extraction, can give archivists and researchers important data that could be used in describing and discovering material.

As a demonstration project, ArchExtract was successful in achieving our goals. The code developed is documented and freely available on GitHub to anyone interested in how it was done or who might wish to take it further. We are very excited by the potential of these tools in dynamically arranging and describing large, text-based digital collections, but even more so by their application in discovery. We are particularly pleased that broad, open source projects like BitCurator and ePADD are taking this work forward and will be bringing NLP tools into environments that we can all take advantage of in processing and providing access to our born digital materials.

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Mary W. Elings is the Principal Archivist for Digital Collections and Head of the Digital Collections Unit of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She is responsible for all aspects of the digital collections, including managing digital curation activities, the born digital archives program, web archiving, digital processing, mass digitization, finding aid publication and maintenance, metadata, archival information management and digital asset management, and digital initiatives. Her current work concentrates on issues surrounding born-digital materials, supporting digital humanities and digital social sciences, and research data management. Ms. Elings co-authored the article “Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums,” and wrote a primer on linked data for LAMs. She has taught as an adjunct professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, New York (2003-2009) and School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University, Washington, DC (2010-2014), and is a regular guest-lecturer in the John F. Kennedy University Museum Studies program (2010-present).

In the past, the Indiana Archives and Records Administration (IARA) would simply receive, hash and place digital accessions in storage, with the metadata keyed into a separate Microsoft Access Database. Currently, IARA is automating many of its records processes with the APPX-based Archival Enterprise Management system (AXAEM). When the implementation concludes, this open source, integrated records management and digital preservation system will become the main accessioning tool. For now, and for accessions outside AXAEM’s reach, IARA uses Bagger. Both AXAEM and Bagger comply with the BagIt packaging standard: accessions captured with Bagger can later be readily ingested by AXAEM. IARA anticipates time gains and record/metadata silos reduction.

Initial Project Scope

IARA aims to capture required metadata for each accession in a consistent manner. Bagger allows this to be done through a standard profile. IARA developed a profile inspired by the fields and drop-down menus on its State Form (SF 48883). When that profile was initially implemented, Bagger scrambled the metadata fields order and the accession was not easily understood. John Scancella, the lead Bagger developer at the Library of Congress implemented a change that makes Bagger now keep the metadata sequence as originally intended in the profile. IARA then added additional metadata fields for preservation decisions.

Scope Expansion and Metadata Fields

With colleagues’ feedback, it appeared IARA’s profile could be useful to other institutions. A generic version of the profile was then created, that uses more generic terms and made all the metadata fields optional. This way, each institution can decide which fields it would enforce the use of. This makes the generic profile useful to most digital records project and collecting institutions.

The two profiles display similar metadata fields for context (provenance, records series), identity, integrity, physical, logical, inventory, administrative, digital originality, storage media or carriers types, appraisal and classification values, format openness and curation lifecycle information for each accession. Together with the hash values and files size that Bagger collects, this provides a framework to more effectively help evaluate, manage and preserve long term digital records.

Below are the profile fields:

Figure 1: IARA Profile with Sample Accession Screen (1 of 2)

Figure 2: IARA Profile with Sample Accession Screen (2 of 2)

The fictitious metadata values in the figures above are for demonstration purposes and include hash value and size in the corresponding text file below:

Figure 3: Metadata Fields and Values in the bag-info.txt File after Bag Creation

To use the IARA’s profile, its generic version or any other profile in Bagger, download the latest version (as of this writing 2.5.0). To start an accession, select the appropriate profile from the dropdown list. This will populate the screen with the profile-specific metadata fields. Select objects, enter values, save your bag.

For detailed instructions on how to edit metadata fields and obligation level, create a new or change an existing profile to meet your project/institution’s requirements, please refer to the Bagger User Guide in the “doc” folder inside your downloaded Bagger.zip file.

To comment on IARA’s profiles, email erecords[at]iara[dot]in[dot]gov. For Bagger issues, open a GitHub ticket. For technical information on Bagger and these profiles, please refer to the LOC’s Blog.

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Tibaut Houzanme is Digital Archivist with the Indiana Archives and Records Administration. John Scancella is Information Technology Specialist with the Library of Congress.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s (Illinois) library-based Research Data Service (RDS) will be launching an institutional data repository, the Illinois Data Bank (IDB), in May 2016. The IDB will provide University of Illinois researchers with a repository for research data that will facilitate data sharing and ensure reliable stewardship of published data. The IDB is a web application that transfers deposited datasets into Medusa, the University Library’s digital preservation service for the long-term retention and accessibility of its digital collections. Content is ingested into Medusa via the IDB’s unmediated self-deposit process.

As we conceived of and developed our dataset curation workflow for digital datasets ingested in the IDB, we turned to archivists in the University Archives to gain an understanding of their approach to processing digital materials. [Note: I am not specifying whether data deposited in the IDB is “born digital” or “digitized” because, from an implementation perspective, both types of material can be deposited via the self-deposit system in the IDB. We are not currently offering research data digitization services in the RDS.] There were a few reasons for consulting with the archivists: 1) Archivists have deep, real-world curation expertise and we anticipate that many of the challenges we face with data will have solutions whose foundations were developed by archivists and 2) If, through discussing processes, we found areas where the RDS and Archives have converging preservation or curation needs, we could communicate these to the Preservation Services Unit, who develops and manages Medusa, and 3) I’m an archivist by training and I jump on any opportunity to talk with archivists about archives!

Even though the RDS and the University Archives share a central goal–to preserve and make accessible the digital objects that we steward–we learned that there are some operational and policy differences between our approaches to digital stewardship that necessitate points of variance in our processing/curation workflow:

Appraisal and Selection

In my view, appraisal and selection are fundamental to the archives practice. The archives field has developed a rich theoretical foundation when it comes to appraisal and selection, and without these functions the archives endeavor would be wholly unsustainable. Appraisal and selection ideally tend to occur in the very early stages of the archival processing workflow. The IDB curation workflow will differ significantly–by and large, appraisal and selection procedures will not take place until at least five years after a dataset is published in the IDB–making our appraisal process more akin to that of an archives that chooses to appraise records after accessioning or even during the processing of materials for long-term storage. Our different approaches to appraisal and selection speak to the different functions the RDS and the University Archives fulfill within the Library and the University.

The University Archives is mandated to preserve University records in perpetuity by the General Rules of the University, the Illinois State Records Act. The RDS’s initiating goal, in contrast, is to provide a mechanism for Illinois researchers to be compliant with funder and/or journal requirements to make results of research publicly available. Here, there is no mandate for the IDB to accept solely what data is deemed to have “enduring value” and, in fact, the research data curation field is so new that we do not yet have a community-endorsed sense of what “enduring value” means for research data. Standards regarding the enduring value of research data may evolve over the long-term in response to discipline-specific circumstances.

To support researchers’ needs and/or desires to share their data in a simple and straightforward way, the IDB ingest process is largely unmediated. Depositing privileges are open to all campus affiliates who have the appropriate University log-in credentials (e.g., faculty, graduate students, and staff), and deposited files are ingested into Medusa immediately upon deposit. RDS curators will do a cursory check of deposits, as doing so remains scalable (see workflow chart below), and the IDB reserves the right to suppress access to deposits for a “compelling reason” (e.g., failure to meet criteria for depositing as outlined in the IDB Accession Policy, violations of publisher policy, etc.). Aside from cases that we assume will be rare, the files as deposited into the IDB, unappraised, are the files that are preserved and made accessible in the IDB.

Preservation Commitment

A striking policy difference between the RDS and the University Archives is that the RDS makes a commitment to preserving and facilitating access to datasets for a minimum of five years after the date of publication in the Illinois Data Bank.

The University Archives, of course, makes a long-term commitment to preserving and making accessible records of the University. I have to say, when I learned that the five-year minimum commitment was the plan for the IDB, I was shocked and a bit dismayed! But after reflecting on the fact that files deposited in the IDB undergo no formal appraisal process at ingest, the concept began to feel more comfortable and reasonable. At a time when terabytes of data are created, oftentimes for single projects, and budgets are a universal concern, there are logistical storage issues to contend with. Now, I fully believe that for us to ensure that we are able to 1) meet current, short-term data sharing needs on our campus and 2) fulfill our commitment to stewarding research data in an effective and scalable manner over time, we have to make a circumspect minimum commitment and establish policies and procedures that enable us to assess the long-term viability of a dataset deposited into the IDB after five years.

The RDS has collaborated with archives and preservation experts at Illinois and, basing our work in archival appraisal theory, have developed guidelines and processes for reviewing published datasets after their five-year commitment ends to determine whether to retain, deaccession, or dedicate more stewardship resources to datasets. Enacting a systematic approach to appraising the long-term value of research data will enable us to allot resources to datasets in a way that is proportional to the datasets’ value to research communities and its preservation viability.

Convergences

To show that we’re not all that different after all, I’ll briefly mention a few areas where the University Archives and the RDS are taking similar approaches or facing similar challenges:

We are both taking an MPLP-style approach to file conversion. In order to get preservation control of digital content, at minimum, checksums are established for all accessioned files. As a general rule, if the file can be opened using modern technology, file conversion will not be pursued as an immediate preservation action. Establishing strategies and policies for managing a variety of file formats at scale is an area that will be evolving at Illinois through collaboration of the University Archives, the RDS, and the Preservation Services Unit.

Accruals present metadata challenges. How do we establish clear accrual relationships in our metadata when a dataset or a records series is updated annually? Are there ways to automate processes to support management of accruals?

Both units do as much as they can to get contextual information about the material being accessioned from the creator, and metadata is enhanced as possible throughout curation/processing.

The University Archives and the RDS control materials in aggregation, with the University Archives managing at the archival collection level and the RDS managing digital objects at the dataset level.

More? Certainly! For both the research data curation community and the archives community, continually adopting pragmatic strategies to manage the information created by humans (and machines!) is paramount, and we will continue to learn from one another.

IDB Curation Workflow

The following represents our planned functional workflow for handling dataset deposits in the Illinois Data Bank:

Workflow graphic created by Elizabeth Wickes. Click on the image to view it in greater detail.

Learn More

To learn more about the IDB policies and procedures discussed in this post, keep an eye on the Illinois Data Bank website after it launches next month. Of particular interest on the Policies page will be the Accession Policy and the Preservation Review, Retention, Deaccession, Revision, and Withdrawal Procedure document.

Acknowledgements

Bethany Anderson and Chris Prom of the University of Illinois Archives

Elise Dunham is a Data Curation Specialist for the Research Data Service at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an MLS from the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science where she specialized in archives and metadata. She contributes to the development of the Illinois Data Bank in areas of metadata management, repository policy, and workflow development. Currently she co-chairs the Research Data Alliance Archives and Records Professionals for Research Data Interest Group and is leading the DACS workshop revision working group of the Society of American Archivists Technical Subcommittee for Describing Archives: A Content Standard.

Why do we process archival materials? Do our processing goals differ based on whether the materials are paper or digital? Processing objectives may depend in part upon institutional priorities, policies, and donor agreements, or collection-specific issues. Yet, irrespective of the format of the materials, we recognize two primary goals to arranging and describing materials: screening for confidential, restricted, or legally-protected information that would impede repositories from providing ready access to the materials; and preparing the files for use by researchers, including by efficiently optimizing discovery and access to the material’s intellectual content.

More and more of the work required to achieve these two goals for electronic records can be performed with the aid of computer assisted technology, automating many archival processes. To help screen for confidential information, for instance, several software platforms utilize regular expression search (BitCurator, AccessData Forensic ToolKit, ePADD). Lexicon search (ePADD) can also help identify confidential information by checking a collection against a categorized list of user-supplied keywords. Additional technologies that may harness machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), and that are being adopted by the profession to assist with arrangement and description, include: topic modeling (ArchExtract); latent semantic analysis (GAMECIP); predictive coding (University of Illinois); and named entity recognition (Linked Jazz, ArchExtract, ePADD). For media, automated transcription and timecoding services (Pop Up Archive) already offer richer access. Likewise, computer vision, including pattern recognition and face recognition, has the potential to help automate image and video description (Stanford Vision Lab, IBM Watson Visual Recognition). Other projects (Overview) outside of the archival community are also exploring similar technologies to make sense of large corpuses of text.

From an archivist’s perspective, one of the most game-changing technologies to support automated processing may be named entity recognition (NER). NER works by identifying and extracting named entities across a corpus, and is in widespread commercial use, especially in the fields of search, advertising, marketing, and litigation discovery. A range of proprietary tools, such as Open Calais, Semantria, and AlchemyAPI, offer entity extraction as a commercial service, especially geared toward facilitating access to breaking news across these industries. ePADD, an open source tool being developed to promote the appraisal, processing, discovery, and delivery of email archives, relies upon a custom NER to reveal the intellectual content of historical email archives.

Currently, however, there are no open source NER tools broadly tuned towards the diverse variety of other textual content collected and shared by cultural heritage institutions. Most open source NER tools, such as StanfordNER and Apache OpenNLP, focus on extracting named persons, organizations, and locations. While ePADD also initially focused on just these three categories, an upcoming release will improve browsing accuracy by including more fine-grained categories of organization and location entities bootstrapped from Wikipedia, such as libraries, museums, and universities. This enhanced NER, trained to also identify probable matches, also recognizes other entity types such as diseases, which can assist with screening for protected health information, and events.

What if an open source NER like that in development for ePADD for historical email could be refined to support processing of an even broader set of archival substrates? Expanding the study and use of NLP in this fashion stands to benefit the public and an ever-growing body of researchers, including those in digital humanities, seeking to work with the illuminative and historically significant content collected by cultural heritage organizations.

Of course, entity extraction algorithms are not perfect, and questions remain for archivists regarding how best to disambiguate entities extracted from a corpus, and link disambiguated entities to authority headings. Some of these issues reflect technical hurdles, and others underscore the need for robust institutional policies around what constitutes “good enough” digital processing. Yet, the benefits of NER, especially when considered in the context of large text corpora, are staggering. Facilitating browsing and visualization of a corpus by entity type provides new ways for researchers to access content. Publishing extracted entities as linked open data can enable new content discovery pathways and uncover trends across institutional holdings, while also helping balance outstanding privacy and copyright concerns that may otherwise limit online material sharing.

It is likely that “good enough” processing will remain a moving target as researcher practices and expectations continue to evolve with emerging technologies. But we believe entity extraction fulfills an ongoing need to enable researchers to gain quick access to archival collections’ intellectual content, and that its broader application would greatly benefit both repositories and researchers.

When it comes to working to process large sets of electronic records, it’s all too easy to get so wrapped up in the task at hand that when you finally come up for air you look at the clock and think to yourself, “Where did the time go? How long was I gone?” Okay, that may sound rather apocalyptic, but tracking time spent is an important yet easily elided step in electronic records processing.

At the University of Minnesota Libraries, the members of the Electronic Records Task Force are charged with developing workflows and making estimates for future capacity and personnel needs. In an era of very tight budgets, making a strong, well-documented case for additional personnel and resources is critical. To that end, we’ve made some efforts to more systematically track our time as we pilot our workflows.

Chief among those efforts has been a customization of the Data Accessioner tool. Originally written for internal use at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the project has since become open source, with support for recent releases coming from the POWRR Project. Written in Java and utilizing the common logging library log4j, Data Accessioner is structured in a way that made it possible for someone like me (familiar with programming, but not much experience with Java) to enhance the time logging functionality. As we know some accession tasks take a few minutes, others can run for many hours (if not days). Enhancing the logging functionality of Data Accessioner allows staff to accurately see how long any data transfer takes, without needing to be physically present. The additional functionality was in itself pretty minor: log the time and folder name before starting accessioning of a folder and upon completion. The most complex part of this process was not writing the additional code, but rather modifying the log4j configuration. Luckily, with an existing configuration file, solid documentation, and countless examples in the wild, I was able to produce a version of Data Accessioner that outputs a daily log as a plain text file, which makes time tracking accessioning jobs much easier. You can see more description of the changes I made and the log output formatting on GitHub. You can download a ZIP file with the application with this addition from that page as well, or use this download link.

Screenshots and a sample log file:

Main Data Accessioner folderContents of log folderSample of the beginning and ending of log file showing the start time and end times for file migration

With this change, we are now able to better estimate the time it takes to use Data Accessioner. Do the tools you use keep track of the time it takes to run? If not, how are you doing this? Questions or comments can be sent to lib-ertf [at] umn [dot] edu.

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Kevin Dyke is the spatial data analyst/curator at the University of Minnesota’s John R. Borchert Map Library. He’s a member of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Electronic Records Task Force, works as a data curator for the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM), and is also part of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s (CIC) Geospatial Data Discovery Project. He received a Masters degree in Geography from the University of Minnesota and can be reached at dykex005 [at] umn.edu.

Stanford University Libraries is in the process of changing how it documents its digital processing activities and records lab statistics. This is our third iteration of how we track our born-digital work in six years and is a collaborative effort between Digital Library Systems and Services, our Digital Archivist Peter Chan, and Glynn Edwards, who manages our Born-Digital Program and is the Director of the ePADD project.

Initially we documented our statistics using a library-hosted FileMaker Pro database. In this initial iteration we were focused on tracking media counts and media failure rates. After a single year of using the database we decided that we needed to modify the data structure and the data entry templates significantly. Our staff found the database too time consuming and cumbersome to modify.

We decided to simplify and replaced the database with a spreadsheet stored with our collection data. Our digital archivist and hourly lab employees were responsible for updating this spreadsheet when they had finished working with a collection. This was a simple solution that was easy to edit and update, and it worked well for four years until we realized we needed more data for our fiscal year-end reports. As our born-digital program has grown and matured, we discovered we were missing key data points that documented important processing decisions in our workflows. It was time to again improve how we documented our work.

Stanford Statistics Spreadsheet version 2

For our brand new version of work tracking we have decided to continue to use a spreadsheet but have migrated our data to Google Drive to better facilitate updates and versioning of our documentation. New data points have been included to better track specific types of born-digital content like email. This new version also allows us to better document the processing lifecycle of our born-digital collections. In order to better do this we have created the following additional data points:

Number of email messages

Email in ePADD.stanford.edu

File count in media cart

File size on media cart (GB)

SearchWorks (materials discoverable / available in library catalog)

SpotLight Exhibit (a virtual exhibit)

Stanford Statistics Spreadsheet version 3

We anticipate that evolving library administrative needs, the continually changing nature of born-digital data, and new methodologies for processing these materials will make it necessary to again change how we document our work. Our solution is not perfect but is flexible enough to allow us to reimagine our documentation strategy in a few short years. If anyone is interested in learning more about what we are documenting and why, please do let us know, as we would be happy to provide further information and may learn something from our colleagues in the process.

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Michael G. Olson is the Service Manager for the Born-Digital / Forensics Labs at Stanford University Libraries. In this capacity he is responsible for working with library stakeholders to develop services for acquiring, preserving and accessing born-digital library materials. Michael holds a Masters in Philosophy in History and Computing from the University of Glasgow. He can be reached at mgolson [at] Stanford [dot] edu.

Tucked away in the manuscript collections at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, there are disks. They’ve been quietly hiding out in folders and boxes for the last 30 years. As the University of Toronto Libraries develops its digital preservation policies and workflows, we identified these disks as an ideal starting point to test out some of our processes. The Fisher was the perfect place to start:

the collections are heterogeneous in terms of format, age, media and filesystems

the scope is manageable (we identified just under 2000 digital objects in the manuscript collections)

the content has relatively clear boundaries (we’re dealing with disks and drives, not relational databases, software or web archives)

the content is at risk

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library Digital Preservation Pilot Project was born. It’s purpose: to evaluate the extent of the content at risk and establish a baseline level of preservation on the content.

Identifying digital assets

The project started by identifying and listing all the known digital objects in the manuscript collections. I did this by batch searching all the .pdf finding aids from post-1960 with terms like “digital,” “electronic,” “disk,” —you get the idea. Once we knew how many items we were dealing with and where we could find them, we could begin.

Early days, testing and failsWhen I first started, I optimistically thought I would just fire up BitCurator and everything would work.

It didn’t, but that’s okay. All of the reasons we chose these collections in the first place (format, media, filesystem and age diversity) also posed a variety of challenges to our workflow for capture and analysis. There was also a question of scalability – could I really expect to create preservation copies of ~2000 disks along with accompanying metadata within a target 18-month window? By processing each object one-by-one in a graphical user interface? While working on the project part-time? No, I couldn’t. Something needed to change.

Our early iterations of the process went something like this:

Use a Kryoflux and its corresponding software to take an image of the disk

This was slow, inconsistent, and not well-suited to the project timetable. I tried using fiwalk (included with BitCurator) to walk through a series of images and automatically generate manifests of their contents, but fiwalk does not support HFS and other, older filesystems. Considering 40% of our disks thus far were HFS (at this point, I was 100 disks in), fiwalk wasn’t going to save us. I could automate the process for 60% of the disks, but the remainder would still need to be handled individually–and I wouldn’t have those beautifully formatted DFXML (Digital Forensics XML) files to accompany them. I needed a fix.

Enter disktype and md5deep

I needed a way to a) mount a series of disk images, b) look inside, c) generate metadata on the file contents and d) produce a more human-readable manifest that could serve as a finding aid.

Ideally, the format of all that metadata would be consistent. Critically, the whole process would be as automated as possible.

This is where disktypeand md5deepcome in. I could use disktype to identify an image’s filesystem, mount it accordingly and then use md5deep to generate DFXML and .csv files. The first iteration of our script did just that, but md5deep doesn’t produce as much metadata as fiwalk. While I don’t have the skills to rewrite fiwalk, I do have the skills to write a simple bash script that routes disk images based on their filesystem to either md5deep or fiwalk. You can find that script here, and a visualization of how it works below:

I could now turn this (collection of image files and corresponding imaging logs):

into this (collection of image files, logs, DFXML files, and CSV manifests):

Or, to put it another way, I could now take one of these:

And rapidly turn it into this ready-to-be-bagged package:

Challenges, Future Considerations and Questions

Are we going too fast?Do we really want to do this quickly? What discoveries or insights will we miss by automating this process? There is value in slowing down and spending time with an artifact and learning from it. Opportunities to do this will likely come up thanks to outliers, but I still want to carve out some time to play around with how these images can be used and studied, individually and as a set.

Virus Checks:We’re still investigating ways to run virus checks that are efficient and thorough, but not invasive (won’t modify the image in any way). One possibility is to include the virus check in our bash script, but this will slow it down significantly and make quick passes through a collection of images impossible (during the early, testing phases of this pilot, this is critical). Another possibility is running virus checks before the images are bagged. This would let us run the virus checks overnight and then address any flagged images (so far, we’ve found viruses in ~3% of our disk images and most were boot-sector viruses). I’m curious to hear how others fit virus checks into their workflows, so please comment if you have suggestions or ideas.

Adding More Filesystem RecognitionRight now, the processing script only recognizes FAT and HFS filesystems and then routes them accordingly. So far, these are the only two filesystems that have come up in my work, but the plan is to add other filesystems to the script on an as-needed basis. In other words, if I happen to meet an Amiga disk on the road, I can add it then.

Access Copies:This project is currently focused on creating preservation copies. For now, access requests are handled on an as-needed basis. This is definitely something that will require future work.

Error Checking:Automating much of this process means we can complete the work with available resources, but it raises questions about error checking. If a human isn’t opening each image individually, poking around, maybe extracting a file or two, then how can we be sure of successful capture? That said, we do currently have some indicators: the Kryoflux log files, human monitoring of the imaging process (are there “bad” sectors? Is it worth taking a closer look?), and the DFXML and .csv manifest files (were they successfully created? Are there files in the image?). How are other archives handling automation and exception handling?

If you’d like to see our evolving workflow or follow along with our project timeline, you can do so here. Your feedback and comments are welcome.

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Jess Whyte is a Masters Student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She holds a two-year digital preservation internship with the University of Toronto Libraries and also works as a Research Assistant with the Digital Curation Institute.

Resources:

Gengenbach, M. (2012). The way we do it here”: Mapping digital forensics workflows in collecting institutions.”. Unpublished master’s thesis, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

At the Rockefeller Archive Center, we’re working to get “digital processing” out of the hands of “digital” archivists and into the realm of “regular” archivists. We are using “digital processing” to mean description, arrangement, and initial preservation of born digital archival content stored on removable storage media. Our definition will likely expand over time, as we start to receive more born digital materials via network transfer and fewer acquisitions of floppy disks and CDs.

The vast majority of our born digital materials are on removable storage media and currently inaccessible to our researchers, donors, and staff. We have content on over 3,000 digital storage media items, which are rapidly deteriorating. Our backlog of digital media items includes over 2,500 optical disks, almost 200 3.5″ floppy disks, and almost 100 5.25″ floppy disks. There are also a handful of USB flash drives, hard drives, and older and unusual media (Bernoulli disks, Sy-Quest cartridges, 8″ floppy disks). This is a lot of work for one digital archivist! Having multiple “regular” archivists process these materials distributes the work, which means we can get through the backlog much more quickly. Additionally, integrating digital processing into regular processing work will prevent a future backlog from being created.

In order to help our processing archivists establish and enhance intellectual control of our born digital holdings, I’m working to provide them with the tools, workflows, and competencies needed to process digital materials. Over the next several months, a core group of processing archivists will be trained and provided with documentation on digital media inventorying, digital forensics, and other born digital workflows. After training, archivists will be able to use the skills they gained in their “normal” processing projects. The core group of archivists trained on dealing with born digital materials will then be able to train other archivists. This will help digital processing be perceived as just another aspect of “regular” processing. Additionally, providing good workflow documentation gives our processing archivists the tools and competencies to do their jobs.

Streamlining our digital processing workflows is also a really important part of this. One step in this direction is to create a digital media inventory and disk imaging log that will be able to “talk” to our collections management system (ArchivesSpace). We currently have an inventory and imaging log, but they’re in a Microsoft Access database, which has a number of limitations, one of the primary ones being that it can’t integrate with our other systems. Integrating with ArchivesSpace reduces duplicate data entry, inconsistent data, and further integrates digital processing into our “regular” processing work.

The RAC’s processing archivists establish and enhance intellectual and physical control of our archival holdings, regardless of format, in order to facilitate user access. By fully integrating digital processing into “normal” processing activities, we will be able to preserve and provide access to unique born digital content stored on obsolete and decaying media.

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Bonnie Gordon is an Assistant Digital Archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center, where she works primarily with born digital materials and digital preservation workflows. She received her M.A. in Archives and Public History, with a concentration in Archives, from New York University.